Strong voter disapproval of Joe Biden’s job performance has reached 47% – the highest negative polling number at any point in his presidency, according to a survey published on Saturday.
The Siena College-conducted poll, commissioned by the New York Times, showed that Biden currently lags behind likely Republican candidate Donald Trump 43% to 48% in registered voters nationally.
The survey found that just one in four voters (24%) think the country is moving in the right direction – a key question in the run-up to a national election – and more than twice as many voters said that Biden’s policies had personally hurt them than those who said they had helped.
Of the two-thirds of the country that feels the nation is headed in the wrong direction, the poll found that 63% said they would vote for Trump.
Conducted at the end of February, these results come as the Biden re-election campaign attempts to change the narrative on voter concerns about the Democrat candidate’s age and mental acuity and his handling of foreign policy and the economy. A majority of voters think the economy is in poor condition, the polling showed.
The survey is only the latest to reveal the depths of voter dissatisfaction with the president. Last week, a Bloomberg News poll found Biden trailing Trump in several critical states, including Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, North Carolina, Nevada and Wisconsin.
In the Bloomberg survey, a large share of the respondents voiced concerns with Biden’s age and a significant percentage said Trump was dangerous, and suggested the number of “double haters”, as pollsters call voters who approve of neither candidate, is significant.
Those findings were broadly repeated in Saturday’s Times poll. Biden’s approval rating came in at 38%, with Trump faring better with a 44% favorable rating.
Nineteen per cent of voters said they disapproved of both men, but among them Biden is slightly less hated, with a spread of 7% between Biden (38%) and Trump (45%). That spread, according to the Times, is significant: the candidate less disliked by “double haters” has won the last two presidential elections.
Those findings may bolster what Democrat and Republican pollsters drew from recent primary voting.
In South Carolina last week, the number of primary voters who backed Republican contender Nikki Haley but said they would never vote for Trump is perceived to represent the margin that will ensure Trump’s defeat to Biden in November.
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But the New York Times poll provides an array of red warning lights for the Biden campaign, including signals that the Democratic party coalition of female, Black and Latino voters is fraying.
Among working-class, non-university-educated voters of color, Biden is only narrowly leading, 47% to Trump’s 41%, the poll found. Four years ago, Biden held a 50-point lead.
Last week, Trump suggested that his legal problems has won him support among Black voters.
“I got indicted for nothing, for something that is nothing,” he told the Black Conservative Federation gala in South Carolina. “A lot of people said that’s why the Black people like me, because they have been hurt so badly and discriminated against, and they actually viewed me as I’m being discriminated against.”